Geographies of welcome: Engagements with ‘ordinary’ hospitality

Abstract

We explore the topic of welcome through a geographical lens, setting out the relationships between geographical perspectives and current approaches to welcome and hospitality. We argue that geographers are well positioned to develop engagements with the ‘prosaics’ of welcome that have recently been advocated by scholars in hospitality studies. To make this case, we identify a series of fruitful directions, offering a critical exploration of ‘ordinary’ welcomes via recent geographical insights into feminist geographies of intimacy, family and home, other-than-human relations and postcolonialism. The five articles that constitute this Special Issue build on this editorial to develop critical engagements that explore the geographies of welcome, with particular attention to migration and refugees.